Heretic weaponises Hugh Grant’s innate charm to chilling effect.
Arriving at the tail end of October and with a marketing campaign that emphasises its sinister side, you’d be forgiven for expecting Heretic to be your typical taken captive-style horror movie – and maybe that’s the point. Heretic is devilishly focussed on testing and challenging your – and its protagonists’ – beliefs – and while it tacitly embraces some horror tropes in its course, it’s much more of a psychological thriller that feels like an unnerving conversation that’s starts out perfectly pleasantly only for you to find yourself completely out of your depth and adrift in a deep, dark ocean of uncertainty.
When two your Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) visit the house of Mr Reed (Hugh Grant), they’re hoping to win another convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, Mr Reed is no theological neophyte – quite the contrary and as the conversation progresses, the two missionaries find themselves with a more pressing mission than spiritual enlightenment: survival.
Patiently, methodically, and yes, manipulatively, Heretic reveals itself as an exploration of conviction under siege, using suspense not for shock value, but to peel away the characters’ layers of belief and doubt. Thatcher and East both deliver convincingly vulnerable yet resilient performances as the missionaries, whose faith is a mixture of wide-eyed naivety and deep-rooted conviction. It’s that volatile dichotomy that makes them so dangerously susceptible to Reed’s psychological games. Grant’s performance as Reed is a revelation in controlled menace. Rather than play against type, Grant gleefully turns his innate charm up to eleven and chillingly uses his disarming affability and eloquence as a veil to obscure his dark designs until it’s far too late.
As the trailer states explicitly, Heretic is a film of two halves, before Sisters Barnes and Paxton choose a door and after, and it’s a much stronger film in that first half. As the tension rises, Grant orchestrates a gripping game of intellectual cat and mouse with Thatcher and East, the threat never more than implied but oppressively present as Reed dismantles, dissects and dissembles the tenets of the missionaries’ faith in ways both abstract and deeply personal. Not that the film drops off after the choice has been made, it’s just that it alters its tone a little and becomes a little more conventional, while remaining a gripping and effective thriller.
The film’s visuals are restrained yet effective. Reed’s isolated home, with its shadowy interiors and closed-off labyrinthine spaces, becomes an embodiment of his own cryptic nature, amplifying the characters’ isolation and slowly eroding their sense of security. Beck and Woods skilfully avoid the usual horror clichés, instead cultivating tension through minimalistic cinematography and careful pacing, inviting the audience to feel the walls closing in as Reed’s words dig deeper into the characters’ minds.
There’s an ambition to the narrative, diving as it does headfirst into complex themes of faith, power, and the fragility of certainty. At times, Heretic almost seems more interested in theological debate than suspense, but it’s always just another facet to the multi-level manipulations of Mr Reed who seeks to beguile and bewitch the viewer as much as he does his diegetic victims. Its cerebral approach never feels superficial or pretentious, the method in the menace becoming satisfyingly clear by the film’s finale.
Heretic is less about the supernatural and more about the unsettling realities of human psychology and the power of persuasion, a low-key critique of modern social discourse. It doesn’t rely on jump scares or monsters; instead, it lets Hugh Grant’s quietly terrifying performance resonate long after the credits roll, forcing us to reflect on how much of our lives are built on foundations that were manufactured and manipulated to have us behave and react in predictable, exploitable ways. For those who prefer their thrillers with a side of existential dread, Heretic is compulsive, essential viewing, proving that sometimes the most dangerous monsters are the ones who wield words instead of weapons.
